Archive
Public Bible Study
by Noah Lugeons
I spent the day yesterday doing my civic duty. I did jury duty once before in a small town down south and I was in and out in two hours, but in NYC it’s a bit different. Here you go into a large room and sit there for eight hours while they play bad movies so loud it’s hard to read. They call names and you leave and go do something, but I’m not entirely sure what it is, as my name was never called. So I basically sat in a large, uncomfortable room where I wasn’t allowed to use my phone for eight hours.
Luckily, I had some reading I needed to catch up on. We won’t be covering Exodus on the show until episode 13, but that’s no excuse to slack off. So I brought my Oxford 4th Edition Annotated NSRV Bible and I brought a notepad in case jokes or segment possibilities occurred to me while I was reading and I brought a highlighter, as I’ve taken to highlighting every passage in the bible where god does something horrible. And for some reason, it never occurred to me what kind of reaction this was going to draw.
So there I am, whittling away very long hours at a table with a bible that I’m clearly studying intently. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised when a very friendly Christian woman (or, as I would discover, a Christian woman with a very friendly facade) walked up to me, pulled up a seat and said, “I don’t want to interrupt your bible study, but if you don’t mind, are you in seminary?”
For the record, I could not possibly look less like I was in seminary without the addition of facial tattoos.
Now, three answers occurred to me, but none of them seemed socially acceptable:
- “Atheist. Just reading it to make fun of it later,”
- “Oh please,have a seat. Anything to interrupt me from this horrible fucking book” and
- “I’m boning up for an interview for the new anti-Christ position.”
And honestly, there are a lot of situations where I would have run with any of those, but in this instance it wouldn’t have been appropriate. After all, I was inviting the conversation by publicly reading a bible to the point of highlighting and taking notes. It was a fair question and she was probably a really nice person and I was going to be stuck in a room with her for most of the rest of the day, so I scratched all of those answers.
Then my mind started automatically looking for excuses. I was clearly reading and writing in English so I couldn’t go with the old, “¿Que?” and it would be hard to pretend that I actually had porn hidden inside it unless I could actually make with some porn (and remember, I wasn’t allowed to bring in my phone).
Ultimately I opted for the truth and that pissed her off so much I wish ended up wishing I’d just been a dick.
“Actually I’m an atheist and I’m studying it for debate purposes,” I said in as friendly a way as possible.
“So you don’t believe a word of it?” she asked incredulously.
“Well, I mean… I believe some of the geography and stuff.”
She made several false starts at speech at this point. She clearly wanted to say several things that Jesus wouldn’t let her say. Finally she settled on something like, “Well I hope you find some answers in there because I don’t envy your soul.”
“Okay, well… you know… have a nice day or whatever,” I offer back and she welcomes the opportunity to end the conversation. She takes a seat well across the room and kind of half-ass glares at me a bit.
At this point I realize that unless I want to do this a few more times, I should put the bible away and read something else. I suppose she took it as a personal insult that the other distraction I brought was “The God Virus”.
Episode 10: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of Christian Compact Fluorescents “Let There Be Light Bulbs”. Are you tired of seeing all the benefits that godless scientists have brought to your life? Are you sick of facing all the perfectly obvious physical evidence that your beliefs are wrong? Well try a little less illumination and a little more enlightenment with “Let There Be Light Bulbs”. Each bulb contains our patented “Through a glass darkly” technology that will allow you to easily blind yourself to everything that isn’t happening inside your head.
And now, the Scathing Atheist.
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 25th and we’re going for an hour tonight, so hopefully you hit traffic.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from sacrilegious New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
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Heath, Lucinda and I will dig through 80 pages of Bible without encountering a single moral,
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I’ll rudely correct my wife when she says, “boringest”,
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and Heath will spend 4 minutes making God glad he doesn’t exist;
But first, the Diatribe.
Diatribe:
I got a very compelling email from Dan in Toronto a few days back and I started to draft a response, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should address Dan’s concerns in a wider venue.
It was a pretty long email, but I pulled a quick excerpt that I think sums up the point. Dan starts off by admitting that he really enjoys the show and it makes him laugh, but he wonders what the cost of those cheap laughs really are in the following paragraph:
“The problem is one of productivity. What do we, as a movement, gain by being so antagonistic toward religion? It’s hard to imagine a believer that listened to your show having any reaction but a calcification of their dogma. Ultimately you’re providing the caricature that religious leaders need to smear atheists as cruel, angry and uncaring. And to what end? Have you done more in the end than simply affirm opinions already held? Have you done more than preach to the choir?”
As to providing a caricature to the opposition, well, that may or may not be true. I’m sorry, but those Christians would find something to be pissed off about regardless of what I do. But I don’t want to be dismissive. I have a lot of respect for Dan’s opinion here and he’s not the first person to bring it up. Hell, Heath, Lucinda and I discussed it in depth before we recorded episode one. Clearly, we fell on the good-outweighs-the-bad end of the argument, but I do feel that people like Dan still deserve an explanation.
The question is basically one of purpose and the tone of Dan’s email suggests that he believes that the purpose of an atheist show should be outreach to the religious community. I don’t mean to oversimplify the objection, but the implication is there that the first goal of an atheist show should be one of PR. That does make sense when you belong to a group seen as less trustworthy than rapists, but I also think it sells us short.
There are plenty of great atheist outreach podcasts. The Atheist Experience, the Thinking Atheist, Reasonable Doubts, An American Atheist Podcast… these are all great shows that I could recommend to a religious person if they wanted to know more about atheism. But that doesn’t mean that the only purpose an atheist show can serve is outreach.
I don’t mean to downplay the importance of outreach, but I fear that if we focus on it too much, we lose sight of an equally important element of the movement: Mobilization. It’s not enough to sway minds if we can’t also sway the feet they’re connected to.
So when we started this show, we tossed “outreach” out the window and I try to make that clear in the first 12 seconds of the show. In fact, I tried to make that clear in the first two words of the title. I’d have called it the “Fuck Jesus Show” if I thought iTunes would still promote it.
Religious people are welcome to listen to this show, but they aren’t invited. This show isn’t for them. They’ve got enough.
I’ve gone to church before and I’ve never complained afterwards that the pastor didn’t include the atheist point of view in his sermon. I’ve never written an angry letter to a televangelist for not being nicer to atheists when he tells them they’re all going to hell. If a Christian listens to this show and gets pissed off about it, I look at it like a neighbor showing up at your barbecue uninvited. You welcome him in and give him a beer anyway and then he starts complaining because there’s no vegetarian menu.
There is a time and a place for nice, but there’s a time and a place for fuck you as well. And in this movement we need both. Nice is good for outreach. Nice is good for PR. Nice is good for winning converts and softening our image. But fuck you has its uses, too. Fuck you is good for rallying the troops. Fuck you is good for boiling the blood. Fuck you is good for reminding people why they got active about atheism in the first place. And what’s more, when people are trying to shove their religion into your schools, your government and your life, Fuck You is not only useful, but it’s the only correct response.
The end result it that I spend a lot of time preaching to the choir. But what’s wrong with that? Keep in mind that despite the connotations implied in the expression, the preacher man does still preach to the choir! You have to. You can’t just assume that somebody who read The God Delusion back in 2009 is still as fired up about as she was when she put the book down. We all have to be reminded from time to time that these battles are still being fought and we still need all hands on deck.
So thanks for the email Dan, and if you’d like to continue the conversation I look forward to your response. But keep in mind that you started your email with the words, “I really enjoy your show…”, and I would argue that that’s enough.
If I make some atheists laugh, I’ve really done as much as I need to do to justify the effort. I don’t think it’s fair to judge everything done in the name of atheism solely through the lens of its effect on religious people. Singing hymns help Christians convince atheists that there’s a god, but that isn’t the point of singing hymns. We accept that Christians can do Christian things for Christian reasons. Why can’t an atheist do the same?
Headlines:
In our lead story tonight, Pope Francesca shows exactly how paper thin that whole “reform and focus on the people” thing was when he voiced support for the Holy See’s crackdown on the “Nuns on a Bus” movement in the US.
Basically, the issue here is that these nuns have threaten the authority of the Vatican by proving that you can do good works without hating gay people and demonizing abortion, positions which the Catholics actually refer to as “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic Faith”.
First of all, I wouldn’t call the abortion issue a feminist cause. I know lots of dudes who are psyched about Roe v Wade for good reason. Women as a whole want to be moms a lot more than men as a whole want to be dads.
Also, if you’re calling a group of nuns radically liberal, your organization is falling off the conservative side of a world you still think is 6000 years old and flat.
Yeah and the “radical” ones apparently comprise about 80% of all US nuns. The group says that the Vatican has reached “flawed” conclusions based on “unsubstantiated accusations”, though it wasn’t clear if they were referring to their own condemnation or the whole doctrine of Catholicism when they said that.
But I think this story really highlights the divide between what the Vatican is saying and what Catholics, at least here in the US are actually doing and believing. When 80% of your representatives are doing it one way and you’re still insisting that they do it the other way, you’re not allowed to then sit around and ask yourself, “Why are people leaving our church?”
But if they did want to sit around and ask that, it wouldn’t take too much brainstorming to recall a few other hiccups in their PR campaign of late.
Right, and here these nuns are with a slice of redemption on a silver fucking platter. If Pope Frankincense embraced their movement or even refused to condemn it, even people like me would have to stand back and say, “Hey wait a minute, this guy might actually be ready to bring the Vatican into the modern world”, but no. Status quo. Shut them women up so us men can get to important things like deciding what women should do.
You have to admit, the oppression of women as a group, has been successful on a global scale since Genesis 3. And it’s been good. Yes, we do a lot better job of hiding it in secular America than in Vatican City or Tehran, but we participate nonetheless.
http://news.yahoo.com/pope-francis-supports-crackdown-us-nuns-150211781.html
And in other news, the ephemeral nature of Pope Frankenstein’s “reforms” haven’t stopped a bunch of Catholic fundies from getting pissed off about them. The Society of Saint Pius X, a group that is described as “ultra-traditionalist” in comparison to the Catholic Church, charges that Pope Francophile is so focused on people not starving to death and shit that he’s forgetting to brainwash them.
These guys are lobbying the Catholic Church to stop being so progressive. They’re like the devil on the shoulder of the devil on the shoulder of the devil saying “I know the pitchfork is suspicious, but trust me you’re the angel. Pass it on.”
Pyschomachia cubed.
The leader of the group, Bishop Bernard Blowjob… I mean, Fellay, has made a habit of sharply criticizing the Vatican since Pope Benny was rockin’ the big hat. I’m all for sharply criticizing the Vatican of course, but unlike myself, he’s been arguing that the Vatican hasn’t been bat-shit crazy enough.
So I’m trying to decide what’s the ultimate example of politically untenable, and I settled on comparing these guys to holocaust deniers. Then I found out one of their prominent members for years was famous holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson.
(THIS GUY WAS BORN IN THE UK IN 1940, AND DENIES THE HOLOCAUST!!!)
You can’t make this shit up. Granted he WAS recently expelled from the SSPX, but NOT because of publicly denying the holocaust.
At least when it comes to the holocaust, they’re equal opportunity appeasers.
The SSPX, which sounds like a group of British Special Ops Roller-Bladers, by the way, fears that the Vatican is modernizing too quickly, which is kind of like fearing that Rush Limbaugh might be too healthy. In an email that Fellay boldly nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, he accused the Pope of “man-centered philanthropy” rather than “true religious leadership”.
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What kind of philanthropy isn’t “man-centered”?
You’d think these guys might know a little bit of Latin and Greek. Doesn’t philanthropy mean “love of humanity” ?
http://news.yahoo.com/catholic-rebel-group-begins-criticizing-pope-173638858.html
And in the former Soviet Union, former sane person Vladimir Putin looks ready to enact a law that would make it illegal in Russia to “offend religious feelings”. The current bill limits the offended parties to Christians, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists and trust me on this one, at least 75% of those people are pretty easy to offend.
Blaspheming at Buddhists is tricky . . .
“Nothing isn’t not always or never everythingness!!!”
“Things matter and I am.”
Yes, much easier to offend is the craziest non-vampiric Vlad of all time. This bill is a reaction to the literal riot that followed Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance in which they criticized hang-gliding, bear-wrestling, hockey-phenom Vladimir Putin; for which each member of the group was given a two year sentence in a remote prison camp for (quote) “Hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. So yeah, hard to imagine how this law might get abused.
I’m actually kind of surprised with the punishment. I would have assumed Putin would have something a little more theatrical, like a slow-moving crotch laser, or a shark tank dipper.
Well, if it helps, I’m sure he spelled out the details of his evil plan before he sent them to the Gulag.
But it’s not exactly a James Bond level situation here, is it? If an all-girl band, dressed like Fat Albert characters, is your arch enemy, then you might be the bad guy in a cartoon show for girls on Disney Afternoon.
Well if that’s the case somebody better get Princess Luna and Ms. Harshwhinny on the line because we’re seeing more and more of these blasphemy laws being enacted all over the world. As Americans, the idea of free speech is so sacrosanct that it immediately makes us queasy and this is one of those few areas where I think we Americans actually have it right. Blasphemy laws get the whole thing backwards to begin with. If you’re offended by what I say, that shouldn’t be my problem.
If you’re offended by hearing blasphemous things like science, stop hanging out around reality where all the science happens.
And moving so far south it’s practically north again, our next story lands us in the land of Hobbits and Hobbit-references, New Zealand. This story comes to us from Paul Fidalgo at the Friendly Atheist blog. Kiwi teacher Christopher Scott Roy alleges that he lost his job as a teacher at Tamaki College in Aukland for the egregious infraction of not believing that there’s a little man in your head somewhere that drives your body like Voltron.
Nice – 80’s cartoon reference # 2 for you on the day. My Little Pony, and now the Defender of the Universe.
I’m planning to squeeze Inspector Gadget in for the trifecta. Roy, who left the school back in 2010, alleges that the school had an outlook that (quote) “saw Christian [and] Mormon faith as a core responsibility”.
This story gets a little tricky, as he actually settled his grievances with the school a while back and is now claiming that he did so “under duress and had no access to legal advice at the time the… settlement was signed”.
What’s the atheist dramatic act for protesting this? Maybe a really pushy science fair occupying the college’s chapel space. With people reading text books really loud, like a baptist minister: “Endoplasmic Reticulum”
And in exploding dildo news, a Spanish “anticlerical pro-sex toys group” is claiming responsibility for a series of amateur bombings, many involving vibrating rubber penises. Several packages containing vibrators and what the article called “mini-bombs” were sent to prominent Catholics around Spain.
This is great . . . Normally we have to make unsolicited dick jokes and those can get confused with rape jokes.
But these guys really just teed up the dick jokes for us this time. This is such a perfect piece of news for our tiny niche of offensively humorous atheist podcasts. It’s like the day when the midget actor community heard the news that Willow was being cast.
Do you think when they read the article anybody said, “Hey, the bombs weren’t that mini”?
Shipping was free, but they probably had to pay extra for handling.
The only injury mentioned in the article was a minor injury to a postal worker who was handling one of these packages when it exploded prematurely.
Somehow, the driver got the shaft, and no tip.
Well, in their defense, the group apologized for that incident in an email later where they said that nothing like this had (quote) “ever happened to them before”.
The delivery person probably found it flattering. He should have just waited 10 minutes, adjusted his grip, and tried to deliver it again.
So far this group has been responsible for a largely comedic series of fuck ups so we’re making jokes quick while we still can, but it looks like pretty soon they’re going to actually blow some people up and then this shit won’t be funny anymore.
Must continue dick joke . . .
Ummmmmm . . . Toma-Cock Missiles . . .
One more . . . The Uni-Corn Bomber . . .
Ok I’m done . . .
Would a joke about oversize black dildo’s be stretching it . . .
Ok last one . . . Penis bombs for priests is one thing, but carpet bombs for nuns . . .
Ok really the last one. . . Instead of sending UPS, they should have dropped them with “sexual predator drones”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/19/spanish-anarchists-catholics-explosive-vibrators
And in domestic news, a surprisingly rational decision from the Virginia Supreme Court confirms that you can’t sue your church for liking gay people. This story actually begins back in 2006 when a large contingent of the congregation at the Falls Church in Fairfax, Virginia started getting worried that the church was getting a little too lovey-dovey with the homo-butt sexers.
If I was donating money to the KKK, and they started tolerating blacks and jews all of sudden, I’d want my money back.
The group voted to leave the church but when they were faced with the daunting task of starting their own new gay-hatin’ church, they decided it would be easier to just sue the leadership at their old church and try to get the property in a homophobic coup.
That’s like paying for a homeopath to heal you magically, and then suing them after you get better, when you find out they cheated and learned to use some real medicine.
You know that actually happened with Zicam? I shit you not, they got in trouble for putting medicine in their medicine.
Anyway, somehow this shit got all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court and might yet go higher, but at the moment the court sides with the people who actually own the church and affirms their rights to not be bigots. Odds are high that we haven’t heard the last of this story though, as even if this one is settled, there are plenty of similar lawsuits going on all over the country.
“Put his hand on a bible and ask him how much he hates fags on a scale from 1 to 10. Anything under 7, and he’s clearly not fit to run a proper church.”
And in a combination of foreign, domestic and interdimensional news, the Vatican has confirmed a miracle in Colorado Springs. In the ongoing beautification of German nun Mother Teresia Bonzel, the vatican’s rigorous standards of evidence have confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt that the unexpected recovery of a four year old with cancer could only be attributed to the intervention of a dead nun from Germany.
Germany could really use this. Curing cancer is just about the only way to start getting the country a nice nod in the history books again.
Apparently the young man, who makes no claim whatsoever to having been cured miraculously, resents the assertion and isn’t a Catholic, had a tumor in his colon and despite a pretty miserable outlook, he got better. What distinguishes this from the all-too-infrequent but still plentiful stories of people suddenly recovering from grave illnesses? Why two nuns were reciting a magical incantation on or about the day that the illness reversed course.
This doesn’t seem like smart engineering by god here. Why not just get rid of cancer? But I guess that’s like everyone getting a trophy.
The then-boy, now-man at the center of this whole thing is skeptical of the Vatican’s claims, pointing out that God must spend a lot of time deciding to kill other kids whom nuns also prayed for, but that didn’t stop the Vatican from putting their seal of approval on it.
Every good thing is a prayer-induced miracle, and every bad thing is a mysterious oversight. Well, I can make up tautologies too. Heads, I fuck you . . . Tails, you fuck me.
And from the “Right-for-the-Wrong-Reason” department, Christian author Anna Ariel has a new book coming out titled, “Oprah Winfrey, The Most Dangerous Woman on the Earth” where she warns Christians about the dubious spiritual messages hidden within Oprah’s seemingly benign declarations.
Did “On the Origin of Species” finally get the Oprah Bump?
Not sure, but I know one book that won’t. Interestingly, the press release suggests that the author isn’t pissed at Oprah for promoting dangerous, pseudo-scientific, superstitious bullshit; she’s pissed at Oprah for promoting the wrong dangerous, pseudo-scientific, superstitious bullshit.
And look, I’m all about the “Most Dangerous Woman on the Earth” title for Oprah. She’s made a career of giving demonstrably incorrect medical advice to people too stupid to know any better and she’s made gazillions by pretending to be a philanthropist. Hint to Oprah viewers, by the way, if you’re getting rich off your philanthropy, you’re doing it wrong.
Yeah she’s like a mega-church without the guise of religion.
Now, I’m gonna tactfully avoid any potentially racist sounding references to kettles and pots here, but a book that claims the problem with Oprah’s promotion of pseudo-science is that it’s un-Christian is like attacking drone strikes because they’re noisy.
Like unborn children suing AIDS for the condom problem?
http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/3962071903.html
And finally tonight, in dry, dull and terribly unsatisfying news, a Christian couple is proudly proclaiming that they’ve managed to go two full years post-matrimony without having sex. After fourteen months of sexless courtship, Topeka couple Jon and Darla Crocker celebrated by not fucking for a further twenty five months and counting.
I think all Christians should take a cue from these wonderful role models.
They say they plan to continue to obscenely ignore their biological programming indefinitely, dedicating their sexual misfunction to their Lord and Savior in what they’re calling “Blue Balls for Jesus”. According to the seemingly real “Lark News” the couple occasionally has (quote) “bedroom thoughts”, but always pulls back. Among the tactics used to insure their unnatural state continues, the article lists poor Jon “eating a whole raw potato” to keep his sinful urges at bay.
You know what else is helping them? Jon being a gay, and Darla being a lesbian.
Talk clean to me, baby!
I loved the quote where Darla says that their abstinence was holy before marriage but it’s double-holy now. Look, since we got married, my wife and I have gotten “double hole-y” a time or two, but I’ll guarantee you it was more fun our way.
They could get double holey without breaking their streak, if they pulled off the “Finger-Cuff 69”, a very advanced maneuver in the poop-hole loophole toolbox.
http://www.larknews.com/archives/217
That’ll do it for headlines. When we come back Lucinda will join us and probably bitchslap me for the anal sex reference there.
Poem: Genesis in Two Minutes
by Noah Lugeons
In chapter one God makes the universe and it takes seven days.
In chapter two he makes it again… in a contradictory way.
By chapter three he’s made Adam, here he makes Eve,
Then he kicks them out of Eden cause they’re covered in leaves???
In chapter four God’s a dick to Cain, but not Abel,
So Cain strikes down his brother like he’s the tower of Babel.
In chapter six we meet Noah; God says “Get ready for bruises,
You’re going on the worst boat ride there’ll be until Carnival Cruises.”
Noah praises God for this unspeakable act,
But glancing at his cock’s an unforgivable act.
Then we spend an entire fucking chapter or two,
Learning ad nauseum who begat who.
By chapter twelve we meet Abraham and he uproots his life,
Takes his shit to Egypt and starts pimping his wife.
He fucks a slave, she has a kid and they exile that one,
But then at ninety-nine Sarah bares him a legitimate son.
Abraham tells God there’s at least ten in Sodom with class,
So he sends a couple angels that they try to fuck in the ass.
And when you try to ass-rape angels, what comes is your fault,
Whether your town’s burned down by brimstone or you’re turned into salt.
In chapter seventeen Abraham makes a crazy decision,
Regarding all his sons and slaves and adult circumcision.
In Twenty-Two he gets all screwy, and takes Isaac, his tyke,
Up a mountain and almost sacrifices him before the angels say, “Psyche!”
Later Isaac meets Rebekah, they have Jake and Esau,
The big brother’s got the muscle but the brains of a cow.
Jacob tricks him from his birthright for a warm bowl of soup,
And his old near-sighted daddy’s just as easy to dupe.
Jacob takes two wives, fucks both of them and their maids.
I swear a chapter’s dedicated to Jake getting laid.
In thirty four a dirty whore? No that’s Dinah, Jake’s daughter.
They demand the Hivites foreskins before commencing the slaughter.
Jake has a dozen sons in all but he liked Joseph the best,
So his bro’s conspire against him and they steal his vest.
They sell him as a slave and tell daddy he’s dead.
He winds up a slave of Pharaoh for not performing in bed.
Here he goes all psychic, starts interpreting dreams.
It takes a couple years but at last he’s redeemed.
He stores up food for famine and he gets filthy rich;
His bros come needing munchies and he makes ‘em his bitch.
Joey shows back up much to daddy’s surprise,
And Jacob, now called Israel, eventually dies.
Chapter fifty’s so uplifting, all the tribes makes a truce;
And by now god’s promised the entire known world to the Jews.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show where we set aside a few minutes to talk up some of the great atheist and secular meetups going on around the country and around the world.
We’ll start in Anaheim on the weekend of May 3rd when the Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference will be bringing in all my favorite atheists for a spectacular weekend of godlessness. PZ Myers, Greta Christina, Matt Dillahunty, Darrel Ray, Jamy Ian Swiss, Jessica Ahlquist and yes, I’m naming the speakers, not just all the prominent atheists I can think of.
MAY 3rd: Orange Country Freethought Alliance Conference in Anaheim, CA
http://freethoughtalliance.org/fta/annual-conference/
The friendly atheist Hemant Mehta would like to remind you that Sunday, May 5th is “Interview an Atheist at Church Day”. This is an experimental project but I love the concept. Atheists are volunteering to be interviewed at churches across the nation for a bit of outreach and while most pastors would rather eat glass, a few are taking the challenge. We’ll have notes and links on how to get involved in the show notes.
MAY 5th: Interview an Atheist at Church Day: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/18/interview-an-atheist-at-church-day-is-growing/
Looking beyond the borders of my homeland, we’ve got the 22nd Skeptic’s Congress coming up on the 9th of May in Cologne, Germany. I’d tell you more about it, but I don’t speak German. If you do, though, feel free to check the link.
MAY 9th: 22nd Skeptics Congress in Cologne, Germany
We’ve got a double whammy on May 17th with the Women in Secularism Conference taking place in DC and Imagine No Religion 3 ramping up in Kamloops, British Columbia. We’ll get to that in a second, but ladies first:
Women in Secularism 2 features a phenomenal lineup of speakers including but not limited to Susan Jacoby, Greta Christina, Ophelia Benson and the lovely, witty and talented Rebecca Watson. And if you don’t go, you’re a sexist, so there’s that.
MAY 17th Women in Secularism Conference in Washington DC:
http://www.womeninsecularism.org/
And finally in Kamloops we’ve got yet another mouth-watering list of secular speakers including Horseman number 3 Dan Dennett, Aron Ra, Victor Stenger, DJ Grothe and Mr. Diety. From everything I’ve heard about last year’s event, the folks putting this on put together a show you’ll never forget so if you’re anywhere near the area, it’s going to be worth the trip.
MAY 17th-19th Imagine No Religion 3 in Kamloops, British Columbia
That does it for this week’s calendar, but remember, if you’re involved with an atheist, secular or skeptical event that needs a little free publicity, let me know. You’ll find all the contact info along with links to all the events discussed on this episode on the “Contact Page” at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
Roast:
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the Roast of God!
I’m your roast master, Heath Enwright. Before we talk about the big guy in the sky, let’s meet our dais:
First, we have a Muslim prophet, who wishes to remain anonymous, appearing over Skype, with his image blurred to protect his identity. We’ll hear from him later.
We also have Mary Magdalene . . .
Where is that slut? . . . There she is; the Bible’s own Penny Lane. The filthy groupie whoo-err of Jesus and his crew. You must have been passed around the last supper like a side dish. You belong at a Duke lacrosse party.
Speaking of disgraceful fraternities, the apostles are here . . . The roadies for Jesus and his Judaism cover band.
And speaking of God’s fuckup-of-a-son, that’s right, he’s here tonight too, the Fredo Corleone of the Bible, the Red-Handed Stepchild” . . .
Give it up for Jesus Christ.
I heard this guy was a carpenter. Here’s a lesson you obviously missed . . . Carpentry 101: “Here’s your hammer and nails . . . Whatever you do, don’t get crucified.”
Dumbass . . . How’d that work out for you?
How does dying for my sins taste? Bitter?
You’re like a less interesting, more fictional version of the guy from the Dos Equis commercials.
What does Jesus have in common with the women he fucks? Without a first coming, neither of them can have a second coming.
If your genealogy is described by a Greek tragedy like the New Testament, you might be a redneck.
Y’all belong on a daytime talk show . . . “Were you conceived when your dad magically raped a virgin and secretly impregnated her? Were you almost the first justified abortion? Do you live in the greater Jerusalem area? You could be on our next show.”
All this attention for the man of the zero hour!
I’ll be honest . . . when they asked me to come here and roast God, I was surprised. I thought he was dead. I was sure I had read that somewhere.
But he’s not . . . Look at this bastard. Doesn’t look a year past omega. God is so old, he’s gathering dust to dust. God’s so old, he was here when quote “it was bad”. God’s so old, he lost his virginity to Pandora’s box.
Hey God: How’s your particle, by the way? You know, that boson, that has nothing to do with you? That secret particle you’ve been hiding? You can’t be too happy it’s already named after an atheist, who postulated that shit in 1964.
Caught your ass imbuing fundamental particles with mass? Nobody found that particle right? Cuz that would be embarrassing. I know you love those gaps, but scientists are gonna keep finding stuff. You’re losing real estate faster than Israel.
In closing, I’d like to say on behalf of creation. This isn’t a roast, as much as it’s an intervention. That’s enough with all the mysterious ways, already. You’ve gotta stop being so fucking mysterious; cancer, terrorism, rape, genocide. We all love a good plot twist, but you’re really pushing it.
All I’m saying, is the reveal better be god-damn amazing.
Song:
(G, Emin, G, Emin, G, Emin, C, Emin)
Atheists eat babies, that’s just the way God made ‘em;
I heard it on the news, that’s what that feller said verbatim.
He said lock up all yer young ‘uns and that feller’s never lied;
He said their Girl Scout cookies have Girl Scouts inside.
Them godless motherfuckers’ll never cop to what they done;
But if you turn your back a second, they might julianne yer son.
If you think that they smell good it’s all the baby breath they’re fartin’
Pourin’ milk over a cereal made from the baby on the carton.
(C, Dmin, Emin)
Well Atheists eat babies yes they do.
They’ll put ‘em in a pot and make a stew.
(C, Dmin, G, Emin)
And if you lost yer faith in Jesus you would eat them, too.
So I’ll see you ‘gain next Sunday in that pew.
Atheists eat babies, don’t tell me it ain’t so.
You say you want some proof? Well they proof ‘em in their dough.
I reckon that explains why they hate them Catholic priests.
Those pedophilic bastards always tenderize their meats.
So be careful if yer kids are ripe for atheist cuisine.
And remember that agnostics eat ‘em up to age thirteen.
Cause folks what don’t fear god eat kids with every meal;
There ain’t nothing they like better than the taste of human veal.
Well atheists eat babies, yes they do.
I swear to god and Jesus that it’s true.
Them grumpy goats in their blue housecoats eat kid fondue,
and maybe sometimes orphan cordon bleu.
Or roast them little tykes for barbecue.
For dessert they’ll have a toddler cobbler, too.
They don’t mean the same thing as me and you,
When they ask their waiter for a kid’s menu.
Cause Atheists… Eat Babies… Yes they do.
Outro:
We’ve got time to respond to one quick email before we close things out for tonight. From the “You say tomato, I say it correctly” department, Jordan from Birmingham writes to tell me that she would love the show if it weren’t for the “nails on a chalkboard” reaction she has every time I say the word atheist.
Now, before I dismiss the criticism, I’ll admit that Jordan is correct. It’s not pronounced atheist, it’s atheist, and I am definitely guilty of mispronouncing the shit out of it constantly. That being said, I’ve tried to get that hard T-H in there and when I do I get all lispy. Sorry. I talk fast and sometimes pedantic pronunciation is the first victim. I hope that in time you can come to forgive me.
We’ll be back in 168 hours with the “Did Jesus Masturbate” Edition. We’ll be back to our thirty minute format for that one, but we promise to be doubly funny to make up for it. If you’re one of those people that falls into a Ben & Jerry’s induced comatose depression when this show ends though, fear not, there’s more. You can get us in bite-sized doses on our erratically published blog at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. We’ve also got bonus content there including an extended version of last week’s interview with Carl from Post Rapture Looting.
You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and You-Tube. Be sure to like us and/or follow us and/or subscribe to us and/or share us as you see fit. And don’t forget to swing over to iTunes and give us a review and if you haven’t checked us out on Stitcher yet, get on that shit. My patience is wearing thin.
A lot of people to thank. Obviously I want to thank Heath and Lucinda again for joining me tonight and helping me get through this tome of nonsense. I want to thank everybody who left us a review on iTunes, those really do make my day. I also want to thank everybody who sent us emails. There’s too many to thank by name, but I really appreciate your feedback and at this point I still respond to every email so if you want to drop me a line, you can find the email address on the Contact page of our website.
Most of all, tonight, I want to thank our very most favorite listener of the week, Laura, who gave us money. Only the best people give us money, and they deserve recognition for both giving us money and for being among the best of people. If you feel that you, too, are one of the best people, you can prove it by clicking on the “donation” button on the right side of our home page. In the interest of full disclosure, we’ll keep doing the show one way or the other, but Heath is way funnier if I buy him pizza before we record.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the info on the aforementioned Contact page. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
Live Blogging the Bible, Genesis 34
by Noah Lugeons
Alright, so I have a new favorite chapter in the Bible and I also have renewed hopes that the mammoth task of breaking this whole stupid book won’t all suck. I’m actually shocked that this isn’t one of the stories that Christians trot out more often because it’s fucking awesome.
The story starts out with Dinah, daughter of the notorious pussy-magnet Jacob, catching the eye of Shechem, a Hivite prince. And you know how those Hivites can’t keep their dicks to themselves, so Shechem rapes her. But according to Genesis 34:3, after he raped her he was really sweet to her:
And his soul was drawn to Dinah, daughter of Jacob; he loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her.
And so post-rape, he decides he want to marry Dinah but Jacob and his sons are still understandably pissed about the whole raping their daughter/sister bit so at first they’re reluctant. Shechem is persistent a la Pepe Le Pew so eventually Jacob makes a deal. He tells the prince that if he and all the Hivites will join their tribe, he can marry Dinah. Now that doesn’t sound to bad, but we learned back in Chapter 17 that part of joining their tribe is lopping off a significant portion of your cock.
But Shechem is smitten so he’s all “Lop off my foreskin and force all the men in my tribe to do the same? No problem.” And he agrees to it.
So in what must have been the single most baffling day in Hivite history, all the men cut their foreskins off. Understandably, there’s not a lot getting done in downtown Hivite-ville that day because all the guys are laying in beds moaning “I hate monarchy!” And while they’re in that prone, post-circumcision state, Jacob and his boys roll into town and kill all of them.
Yes, that’s right, they kill all the Hivites after tricking them into chopping at their genitals. I’m guessing the resistance was a bit subdued here. Hell, a lot of them were probably going, “Yeah, slit my throat, sure. Whatever takes my mind off the pain in my dick.”
Episode 9: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new line of Christian feminine hygiene products, Penta-Douche. Remember, when you have that not-so-fresh feeling, it’s because you’re unclean in the eyes of God. So when you’re being shunned for seven days, as is proscribed in all of the Abrahamic faiths, be sure to use our new Adam & Summer’s Eve brand.
Penta-douche; because women are cursed and responsible for the fall of man.
And now, the Scathing Atheist
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 18th and due to an increase in promiscuity, Allah has cut it back to 54 virgins per Jihadee.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from scandalous New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
- Pope Frankie names a group of 8 mini-bosses you’ll have to defeat before entering his lair,
- Carl from Post Rapture Looting joins me for some atheist Easter Egg hunting where we look for eggs we know aren’t there,
- And Representative Joe Barton moves to tackle global warming by first gathering two of every unclean species and seven of every clean one
But first, the Diatribe.
Diatribe:
A lot of theists have trouble accepting that we really don’t believe in god. They like to think that deep down we’re just suppressing our faith but when we find ourselves in a really tough situation, we’ll revert to our programming, we’ll drop to our knees and we’ll start praying. After all, when they look at the world, they see god. So how could we look at the same world and not see him at all?
Similarly, a lot of atheists have trouble accepting that theists really believe in god. We like to think that deep down they know good and damn well that it’s all a myth propagated by power-hungry shamans and that when the shit hits the fan, they’ll abandon their superstitions and turn to a secular solution. After all, when we look at the world, we don’t see a god. How could they look at the same world and see one?
Clearly part of this is just a lack of intellectual empathy. They think we’ve got a ‘god shaped hole’ in our hearts and we think they’ve got a ‘reason shaped hole’ in their heads. It’s a defense mechanism like the one where we demonize the opposite side of the political spectrum. It’s harder to Accept that they’ve looked at the evidence and come to a contrary conclusion than it is to create a caricature of their opinions and pretend that they’re all heartless or stupid.
And I suppose a lot of people would tell me to leave it there. I said something bad about one side and then I said something bad about the other and now can’t we all just get along?
But I think it’s too neat and tidy to write it all off as a self-delusion. After all, when I listen to somebody tell me that they believe that god’s in heaven and Jesus loves them and grandma and Sparky are at the pearly gates waiting for them, I don’t wonder how they believe it. I wonder why they’re not in a bigger hurry to die.
If I ask them, they’ll tell me that god has a plan for them on earth and that they’d miss their kids or their grandkids or their friends or whatever, but if you balance the time we spend on earth with the eternity they expect to spend in heaven, it’s an insignificant blink of the eye. Ten billion years from now your grandkids won’t even remember that you weren’t there while they were learning to poop.
And why aren’t they more eager for their loved ones to die? It seems to me that once mom has arthritis or even a persistent headache she’d be better off in heaven where she wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. How selfish is it for me to hope she lingers on in minor pain for decades just so that I can have her around to babysit the kids? Hell, it seems like as soon as your folks start hitting financial troubles you’d be hoping they’d die so they could move into that mansion god has for them in heaven.
I’ve watched friends grieve the loss of a loved one; both theist and atheist. And I can tell you from a statistically insignificant, unblinded anecdote that one didn’t seem to have any easier a time with it than the other. Somehow the person who professed to believe that their beloved was living in a mansion with a golden driveway in paradise was every bit as bereaved as the person who professed to believe that their loved one no longer existed at all. How could that possibly be?
When I say that I don’t think theists believe their own bullshit, it’s not something I’m basing on my own psychology, it’s something I’m basing on their behavior. If you honestly believed, all the way to your core, that you were going to meet the people you lose in a perfect world in the clouds, how could you possibly mourn their passing? How could a funeral be anything but a joyous occasion?
The religious dingbats of the world like to express their disbelief in atheists with one of the most pervasive and insulting clichés ever coined to smear rationalists; “There are no atheists in a foxhole.”
The idea is that even we heathens will turn to god if things get bad enough. Included, of course, is the unspoken assumption that when we experience this instantaneous conversion, it’ll be their god we’ll start praying to. It never seems to occur to them that if that’s how it worked, all the Christians in the foxhole would start praying to Allah, Shiva and Odin just to be on the safe side.
But I’d like to submit the opposite. When you’re in the proverbial foxhole, myths and superstitions are cold comfort. When the bombs are raining down, nobody’s saying “Shit, I sure hope that one hits us!” and if they were, we’d rightly assume that they’d lost their fucking minds. I submit that when we’re facing the uncertainty of our own deaths, we are all atheists by default.
Contrary to the adage, when it comes down to it, there are no theists in a foxhole.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is my kemosabe Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to Lone Range?
In our lead story tonight, California legislators are subtly suggesting that perhaps the Boy Scouts of America should stop being bigots. A proposed law would strip the Boy Scouts of their tax exempt status along with any other nonprofit that excludes members based on sexual orientation, gender identity or religious affiliation.
There’s been a real outcry surrounding this proposal and strangely enough it’s not because this wasn’t done decades ago. How common sense is this proposal?
- I’d like to read a quote from christiannewswire.com: “Should SB 323 become law it would break new ground in using the tax system to punish those who are disliked by LGBT activists.” Those who are disliked by LGBT activists are called bigots. So the the tax system punishes bigots. Is that unreasonable?
- I’d like a tax system that punishes all sorts of shitty people. That’s actually the whole point of certain taxes. To discourage things with negative externalities, like the actions and opinions of the ignorant.
Yeah, hard to imagine why religious groups would be threatened by a law that strips tax exemptions from groups that institutionalize discrimination, huh?
While most of the major media coverage has focused on the gay stuff, this law would also force the Boy Scouts, and any other group seeking tax exemption, to allow the dreaded atheists to walk amongst them.
- Much like a black person disrupts the front of a bus, an atheist clearly disrupts a lesson in the tying of a bowline knot.
- What’s their problem?
The bill is saying, you can still be an asshole, and you can still have your asshole club.
The government just happens to offer extra credit on the test for clubs that are not assholes . . . So you assholes don’t get those particular bonus points.
- We’re bending over backwards to be tolerant of assholes. We’re just taking away the asshole subsidy they’ve been getting. And we’ll give it right back if they stop being assholes.
California pushes bill to end State tax exemptions for Boy Scouts because of anti-gay, anti-atheist policies:
– From a real news source: http://news.yahoo.com/calif-tax-bill-seeks-punish-scouts-gay-ban-193252719.html
– From Xian Newswire: http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/2250071876.html
From the “Should we call it the Reform Council or the Council on Reform” Department, the Pope has assigned 8 cardinals to advise him on thinking about talking about thinking about reform. While major media headlines like “Pope Makes First Big Decision Naming Advisory Board” and “Pope Makes Tough Decisions as Reforms Loom” would suggest that he’d actually done something, the actual meat of this story is downright vegan.
So Pope Frankfurter has commissioned an advisory panel to look into overhauling the Vatican Bureaucracy. Vatican officials point out that it’s been a quarter century since the bureaucracy was updated, somehow missing the irony that it’s been two millennia since any-damn-thing else about their church was updated.
- Yeah their literature could use a few retractions. Maybe a new edition, in light of all this new shit.
- I heard the advisory panel has a small delegation scouring the woods to confirm or disconfirm the presence of bear shit.
- Maybe the panel can also look into whether there will ever be some way to create individual cross-sections that divide up an entire loaf of bread into convenient pieces.
But the collective media cock-guzzle around Pope Frank-n’-Beans continues and everything he does from washing a foot to wiping lefty is dutifully reported as proof that he’s a real reformer and things are gonna be different under his watch. He’s not like that old creepy pedophile-protecting Palpatine lookalike. He’s an old creepy, pedophile-protecting Droopy Dog lookalike.
- He reminds me of Elmer Fudd, but with a sillier hat . . . doing the “Kill the Wabbit” song to Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries”.
- Sidenote: I’m thoroughly impressed by the lefty wiping. I tried to jerk it lefty one time, and I suffered an elbow injury and an eye injury.
Pope names 8 advisors to think about talking about thinking about reform: http://news.yahoo.com/pope-taps-cardinals-advise-governing-reform-124612388.html
And in earth-shattering international news, women are wearing man-clothes at the Western Wall. This news comes to us from the 1300s via modern day Jerusalem. Several female activists were arrested at the holy site last Thursday for wearing man-shawls and praying out loud.
- The man-shawls don’t help the sexual roles platform, and they definitely muddle the homophobia stance a little.
And as much as my liberal heart wants to stand behind the women involved in this protest, my rational mind says, “you’re trying to pray to an imaginary being whose very existence was largely manufactured to oppress your gender”, so it’s hard for me to rally behind them too much. If you want to advance women in these silly cultures, leave all the talking-to-walls to the men and maybe try reading or something. Just a suggestion.
- Yeah, why the hell do they want to go there or do that in the first place? They must have got Tom Sawyered.
- “Don’t even think about wearing that man-shawl and whitewashing this prayer wall with me.”
Clash with religious authorities at the Western Wall because women are wearing the “man shawls” http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/12/battle-of-the-sexes-at-western-wall/
And in “No-when-to-fold-em” news, a NY nun has admitted stealing more than an eighth of a million dollars to cover her gambling expenses. She now faces six months in prison, which, for the record, I would do in a heartbeat for $128,000. I mean seriously? Six months?
But before you go thinking the sentencing was light because she was a 68 year-old nun, I should mention that her attorney says she’s really, really sorry. And if we were more like Jesus we wouldn’t be so worried about the past.
- I guess you gotta support the habit somehow.
Vinnie “Knuckles” Malone, a source close to the case was quoted as saying, “That bitch just lucky she still has all her fingers. Nun or not, I’ll fuck that whore up.”
- The Knuckles brand of justice sounds surprisingly well-informed on the 1st Amendment.
NY nun admits to stealing $130,000 from churches to pay for her gambling addiction: http://news.yahoo.com/gambling-nun-pleads-guilty-theft-york-churches-224339427.html
And earning the honor of the stupidest politician in the national spotlight this week is Texas Republican… and I’d just like to point out that those two words very often precede the naming of the stupidest politician in the national spotlight on any given week…
- Texas Republicans making political decisions, are like the youngest brother in a big family getting to choose what everyone has for dinner on their birthday. You end up having to appease them once in awhile, so you try to take them seriously that one day, and they’re like “Deep Fried Chocolate Baloney Hot Pockets!!!”
Anyway, Texas Republican Joe Barton was trying to justify a bill to force Obama’s hand on the Keystone pipeline. And atheists, I’m sure, have differing opinions on the issue of this controversial energy project. But I think we can all agree that it takes a class A jackass to use the issue to write off climate change on the grounds of God’s predilection for flooding the whole world.
- The gradual melting of polar ice caps would be the lamest Great Flood ever. Not exactly an awe-inspiring demonstration of omnipotence.
- “Does the water look a couple inches higher to you? That’s it . . . I’m devoting my life to Jesus.”
- Decent amount of slavery in the bible, so that must not have been a man-made phenomenon either. Just pious plantation owners fulfilling their destiny. Somebody’s gotta get enslaved.
Now, if I quoted him directly, I’d probably get accused of making it sound stupider than it actually sounded, so here it is, in all it’s glorious fucktardary: [SOUNDCLIP]
Rep. Joe Barton cites the great flood as evidence that global warming is not man made: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/10/rep-joe-barton-biblical-great-flood-shows-climate-change-isnt-man-made/ (grab soundclip on this one, too!)
And finally tonight, the intrepid radio host and fundamentalist activist Bryan Fischer has uncovered our secret, homofascist plot to make Christians wear Christian badges like ghetto Jews in Nazi Germany.
- We ended up going ahead with that plot? I was thinking thorny crowns though. The sleeve patches are a little too subtle.
- Didn’t Fischer seem strangely preoccupied with the design of the Christian ghetto patch?
Our nefarious strategy had managed to stay so well-hidden over the years that not even the key players instrumental in its implementation knew about it, but despite this nearly preternatural level of secrecy, Fischer’s mind was able to twist through the various corridors of our labyrinth and figure out our plans even before we did. And he did so amidst the following random assemblage of gibberish: [SOUNDCLIP]
- Of course, you never want to hear about a holocaust. Of course. But if another one HAD TO HAPPEN, I’d say Christians are the logical victims. Hold on, what am I talking about? Muslims, obviously. What, it’s a fucking roast!
- I’d say that the most surprising thing I learned when I was researching this story is that spellcheck has no issues at all with the word “homofascist”.
Bryan Fischer discovers our homofascist plot to make Christians wear badges like ghetto Jews: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/12/bryan-fischer-homofascists-will-treat-christians-like-jews-in-the-holocaust/ (grab soundclip!!)
That does it for headlines, when we come back, Carl from the Post Rapture Looting Podcast will join us to discuss all the fun he had over Easter Weekend.
Skit:
Normally I save emails for the end of the show but I got one from a celebrity the other day and it got me really excited. I’m not sure if I he would want me to mention his name, but you know what? Fuck it, I’m pretty stoked, I’m gonna go ahead and tell you. It was from God.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s an email and anybody could say there were God, but the way I figure it, I’ve got exactly as much evidence that this email was written by god as Christians have that the bible was, so I’m rolling with it.
Anyway, it’s pretty cool, so I thought I’d share it with you:
Dear Noah,
This email is intended as official notice that you have been damned.
This action was taken against you by me, the Lord Almighty on April 13th in the year of our me 2013 for trespasses including, but not limited to:
- Taking my name in vain while suggesting that I, Father of Abraham, Granter of Life, Alpha and Omega, am physically comprised of fecal-pornography,
- Making it sound on your show like Jesus is bad at finding keys when, if fact, he is damn good at it, and
- Making a blasphemous exclamation while masturbating on the Sabbath to impure thoughts about your neighbor’s wife in mixed garments.
As a consequence of your damning, the standing invitation of your immortal soul to return to heaven upon its earthly passing has been revoked. Alternate accommodations will be provided. In addition, your prayers will be ignored separately from those of believers, you will not be permitted to use a crucifix to ward off vampires and Jesus says from now on you can find your own fucking keys.
If you feel that you have been damned in error, please reply within 30 days with an explanation of any extenuating or mitigating circumstances along with heaps of sanctimonious praise and obsequious adulation. Failure to remit in the time frame outlined above will result in your damnation being converted to eternal status.
Praise and adulation will be judged at the discretion of the damning party and may or may not be deemed sufficient for salvation.
May God have mercy on your soul… Oh wait, too late for that Bitch.
Jehovah.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show. Normally we try to keep things light hearted and funny on this show, but sometimes there’s nothing funny about what we’re doing. And once in a while we need to step back and recognize that.
That’s why I’m dedicating this week’s calendar to the atheist bloggers and activists in Bangladesh that are risking their lives to do exactly what I’m doing. Freedom of speech is something I blithely accept as my birthright as an American, but not everyone is as fortunate.
I can’t possibly cover all the details of this story in such a short format, but I strongly encourage you to learn more about it. We’ll have links all over the shownotes and if you follow us on Twitter we’ll keep you abreast of the story. Suffice to say that a well-organized group of Islamic militants are trying to use their bully pulpit to divert attention away from their wrong-doing and a group of atheist bloggers have become their unwitting scapegoat.
Two bloggers have already been killed and Islamic leaders are calling for the execution of 84 more named atheist activists.
In response, atheist and humanist organizations all over the world have declared April 25th a day of action to stand with our fellow non-believers. And you can make a difference here. Write a blog, send a letter, join one of the many protests being organized across the country, or, if nothing else, take to social media and let people know what is happening.
Regardless of our beliefs, we can all agree that nobody should die for theirs. I urge you to check out the links at Scathing Atheist (dot) com and learn more.
And now, back to the fart jokes and stuff.
April 25th, stand with the atheist bloggers in Myanmar: http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2013/04/11/on-25-april-2013-we-stand-with-bangladeshi-bloggers-and-activists/
Outro:
There was one email I wanted to respond to before we closed things out for the night, but first a quick correction. You’ll recall that last week Heath and I discussed a nincompoop that wrote an article about how Steven Hawking proved the bible correct by referring to dust. Anyway, I identified the numb-skull as Paul Hitchins, his name is actually Paul Hutchins. So I wanted to apologize, not to the Christian dingle-berry, but rather to the name “Hitchins”. So sorry about that, I owe you more respect.
Okay, so first email comes to us from Renee in Clemsdale and I’m not sure what state or country Clemsdale is in. Renee was very polite in his or her full condemnation of everything we’ve done on the show and, in a round-about way, everything I’ve ever done in my life. But I just wanted to tell Renee that I did love the email, especially the contradictory notion of condemning me to hell in one paragraph, but then hoping I have a lovely day in the next.
Sorry to end on such a somber note, but that does it for our show this week. We’ll be back in 168 hours, when we’ll crack open our bibles and tackle Genesis in the “Holy Babble”. If you can’t get enough of us, be sure to check out our erratically published blog and follow us on Twitter.
I want to throw a big thanks to Carl for joining me early on a Sunday morning for that interview. He had to miss church and everything, so I want to thank him for making the sacrifice. If you haven’t checked out his show, be sure to do that. Once again, it’s the Post Rapture Looting Podcast and we’ll have links to it on the shownotes for this episode. (http://postrapturelooting.net/PRL/)
I want to thank the person who gave us our first donation. Haven’t figured out how to find out who you are so I can thank you by name, but thanks. Really means a lot to us. If you’d like to join this exclusive group of one person, you can donate to the show as well. You’ll find the link on the right side of the page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
If you want to help us out but don’t want to part with any of your hard earned cash, you can always swing by iTunes and give us an awesome review. We really appreciate everyone who does that and we love them more than the other audience members… except the ones who give cash, who we love the most.
Of course, a huge thanks to Heath for everything he does to make the wheels of this podcast turn and a big thanks to everyone who decided to give us thirty minutes of their lives. We’ll be hard at work earning thirty minutes next time. Until then, check out the backlog and do it on Stitcher because seriously, our Stitcher rank sucks balls.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
Why Atheists Always Win at Twitter
by Noah Lugeons
I just reached the satisfying conclusion of a five day flame war on Twitter. My wife’s kind of new to the whole Twitter thing, so I’ve been explaining my technique a bit as I go. It’s been educational for both of us, as it’s forced me to think a lot more about it than I normally do. And over that period, I’ve developed a theory to help explain why I always kick so much ass in Twitter fights.
Now, it’s too broad a generalization to say that atheists always win on Twitter, unless you define winning as being the person who turns out to be correct in the end. I’ve seen a few atheists get their asses handed to them by clever apologists on Twitter, forums, Facebook threads, Reddit, blog comments… you name it. But it seems that the vast majority of the time, I see the atheist beating the religious clod into the ground until they’re pounding their keyboards randomly with shaking fists.
So before I lay out my theory, we have to define two things. One is what I consider “winning” in a flame war. The second is, strangely enough, the word “faith”. We’ll start with the easy one.
The old trope about somebody being wrong on the internet is used to justify a lot of losses in online arguments. I’m not saying there isn’t something to the notion that arguing online is often unproductive, but I think one goes to far when one says it’s “useless”. As I’ve said before on this blog, it helps you hone your skills in live debate, it helps you reinforce your understanding of your own position and it helps you build a community of online support. But there’s also another benefit; it can be really fun.
Debates online are okay. I usually let somebody else takeover when the philosophical arguments get too far in the weeds because that shit bores me eventually. I don’t have the patience to walk theist after theist through all the errors in “irreducible complexity” or “Pascal’s Wager”. But I never back down from a good old fashioned flame war. Hell, I’ve been doing that shit since CompuServe.
In all that time, the enemy hasn’t changed, the wars haven’t changed and thus my tactics haven’t had to change much. Once an argument moves beyond any exchange of rational ideas and turns into a name-calling, juvenile insult war, there’s only one way to win. You have to be the one who maintains your cool longest. Eventually, if you do it right, you’ll get a response like:
You’re a pathetic, tragic, stupid, evil waste of breath. FUCK YOU!!!!1!!!
And then you can break out the champagne because you’ve won. When you’ve reduced a person to something like that, they’ve admitted that they’re through being clever or even intelligent. You’ve cracked their facade of confidence and revealed them to be your intellectual inferior. What’s more, you can pile on all you want at this point because they’ve gotten emotional and you haven’t. You can make them drool if you try hard enough.
For my purposes, this is the only measure of victory in a flame war. Being the last person to lose their cool says that you’re the one presenting the rational argument and they’re the one presenting the emotional one. It doesn’t matter if that’s true or not because all participants have long abandoned the logical standing of their position anyway. It’s simply about who can piss who off first.
And it is in this way that I see atheists win over and over and over again.
Part of this is certainly the fact that we’ve just got the better arguments. There can be little doubt, especially in the mind of a non-believer, who is approaching this question logically and who is approaching it emotionally. It also helps that we are forced into positions where we have to justify our worldview far more often than theists (and, of course, I’m speaking only to the culture I’m familiar with. Can’t say how true that is for my readers outside the US).
And that ultimately brings us to the role “faith” plays in all of this. Religious people love to talk about “faith”, but when they use it, it has a special meaning. If I were to use faith, it would be to describe a near-certainty: I have faith that the porch will hold my weight; I have faith that Heath will show up to record on Tuesday; I have faith that I will win Twitter wars with theists. But that type of faith is entirely different than the “faith” that believers talk about. So much so that they should really have to use a different word. It’s almost the polar opposite of what I mean.
Me: Faith is the expectation that something will behave exactly like it always does.
Them: Faith is the expectation that everything will eventually behave in a way I’ve never observed it behaving.
Ask an atheist and virtually all of them will tell you that they’d be willing to change their minds on the “god” question if compelling new evidence appeared. Ask a theist and virtually all of them would tell you the opposite. Theists look at that and see doubt in the atheists, while we look at it and see doubt in them. After all, I’m confident that my porch will hold my weight, but it would only take one time of me falling through it to change my mind on the subject. It’s a belief I’m so confident about that I don’t have to worry about changing my mind on it.
But consider the religious type of faith in that analogy. They would have to keep walking out on that porch every day, even after it collapsed. They’d have to walk out the back door, fall into the pile of broken lumber below, pluck splinters from their limbs and tell themselves that the porch was still holding their weight. No amount of evidence would sway them from their “faith”. But our kind of faith breeds a certain kind of apathy. If you’re confident enough about a belief, you don’t care. You’re not emotionally invested in the belief that the porch will hold your weight. You don’t bother justifying the belief to yourself with logic puzzles and wagers from long dead mathematicians. I need invoke no syllogism to prove to myself that the porch will hold my weight.
Which brings us back to the flame wars. I won’t deny that I’m emotionally invested in the atheist movement. I’m as emotional about fighting against religious intrusion as I am about any subject. I passionately donate my time, money, creativity and effort to furthering this cause and that is all fueled by an emotional investment. But what I’m emotional about isn’t the fact that god doesn’t exist. I have faith in that the same way I have faith in my porch. I might need a fancy analogy or two to justify it to a believer, but I don’t need anything but the evidence (or overwhelming lack thereof) to settle that question to my own satisfaction.
So when I’m battling with a believer, they keep expecting to find that emotional trigger. They fire blindly because they think there’s something about my atheism that has spurred my activism. In reality, it’s actually something about their religion. Meanwhile, it’s kind of easy to find their trigger. They want to tear down your intelligence because it irks them to think that a smart person would look at the data and conclude that there is no god. So simply being intelligent with your responses is enough to eventually bring out the worst in them.
Sure, we can be disrespectful, scathing and vulgar (hell, that’s kind of my niche), but we never abandon reason. Even in the filthiest of flame wars, I’m always in the realm of logic. And eventually that leaves them in the realm of ad hominem Fuck-Yous.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make someone drool.
Episode 8: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
Sponsor:
This week’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Mitt Romney’s new brand of baking soda, Mormon Hammer. Guaranteed to keep your fridge as free of odor as it is of alcohol, caffeine and gender-equality. So send one of your wives to the store and tell them to look for the whitest baking soda on the shelf: Mormon Hammer.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 11th and bananas are my worst nightmare.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from climatically-schizophrenic New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
- A Louisiana legislator tries to teach kids about religious freedom by taking it away,
- We’ll use the word “fuck” more times than there’s any real need to and
- My wife and my best friend will join me for the most disappointing threesome of all time.
But first, the Diatribe…
Diatribe:
“How Hubble Saved My Soul”
I rejected religion at an early age. My parents were religious but they weren’t church-goers and they only made a half-ass attempt to brainwash me. I can’t tell you exactly when I out-logiced religion, but my earliest atheist memory is at the age of 8 when my 3rd grade teacher settled an argument between me and some other kid by affirming that there was too a god.
Now, I’d say I was proud of that fact, but atheism is nothing to be proud of. Outsmarting a book that starts contradicting itself in the second chapter isn’t very hard. And, as I proved for many years after rejecting my parent’s faith, you can be both an atheist and a gullible dipshit simultaneously.
See, I didn’t do the whole religion thing, but I was every bit as irrational in my puerile new-age hippy tie-dye, goatee, anything goes, neo-pagan spiritualism. I dismissed all the doctrines, but I still had a soft spot in my brain for ancient wisdom. What’s more, I wanted magic and eternal life. I just wasn’t willing to get them from a church.
So I alternately identified myself as a Wiccan, a spiritualist, a Thelemite or, my personal favorite, a Pangeantheologist. I read books on witchcraft and Kabbalah and chakras and high magick and low magick and herbal magick and color magick and chaos magick and shamanic magick and Enochian magick. And I read the I Ching and I read Tarot cards and I read runes and I read palms. And I read Aleister Crowley and Raymond Buckland and Donald Kraig and Israel Regardie and Peter Carroll. And I went to pagan communes and I met gurus and I went on silence retreats and I danced naked around bonfires and I called upon ancient spirits and I invoked undines and deep down I knew the whole time that it was a load of shit.
The cognitive dissonance wasn’t that hard at first, because I was getting laid. But it got harder and harder as I learned more and more about this stuff. There was never any substance. It never made any more sense. There were never any deeper secrets and there were never any results.
My friends would all say, “Oh, you’ve gotta meet this guru” and when I do, I figure out five minutes in that he knows less about what he’s talking about than I do after reading three books on the subject. I would get together with some coven for a big communal spell and I would happen to catch them on one of those rare nights when nothing happened at all. Or worse yet, you would know the ceremony was over when the most gullible jackass in the room says, “Did you feel that?!”
And as I’m going through this whole five year acid trip of the soul, something else was happening too. And even though I wouldn’t realize it for a quite a while, it was steadily eroding the foundation of my bullshit; I started to see the images being returned from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Like practically everyone, I fell in love with these images as soon as I saw them. I was fascinated and I couldn’t possibly see enough. I wanted to know more about what they were and the incredible universe they revealed. But more than that I wanted to know how we got them and what they meant. It was slow and sometimes painful, but that was the origin of my love for science.
Somehow underpaid, uninspired public school teachers had failed to instill any real appreciation for something as fascinating as everything in my developing mind and it took seeing the universe in this scale for me to truly appreciate the wonders of human curiosity.
But it sure made that cognitive dissonance harder. After all, if science said what I believed was bullshit and they could back it up with pictures of the entire fucking universe, who was I to disagree? How could I cocoon myself in some arrogant worldview that places humanity in the center of it all when there were things like the Hubble Deep Field Image to contradict me?
Even the young religions had a multi-century head start on science when it came to this whole “heaven” thing and they were happy to tell you what it was like and who was in charge and how you could get there, but they never managed to take pictures. We never glimpsed the earliest stars through the power of herbal supplements. We never saw a cloud of dust four light years across through proper breathing techniques. We never saw galaxies forming with color-infused water. The methods and practiced that all my hippy gurus promoted had been around for centuries and sometimes millenia, and yet knowledge of their deep and mystical secrets had never managed something as stupefying and eye-opening as even the lowliest of Hubble’s observations. And yes, I’m talking about the blurry shit before they fixed it.
Sure, you eat enough mushrooms and get in a sweat lodge, you’ll see all the bright lights and pretty colors Hubble has to offer, but there’s nothing there. Just like every other silly little spiritual distraction, there’s nothing there. It’s all empty, hollow, meaningless, unsatisfying, Chicken Soup for the Brain drivel. It demands that you suspend your disbelief even to the point of suspending your own senses. It demands that you practice for years at something you can’t actually get better at. It demands that you nod along with every stupid post-modernist notion some yoga instructor blurts out because you don’t want to be the only one at the party wearing incredulity.
But science, as Carl Sagan said, brings the goods. The appeal of all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo was rooted in my desire to be part of something larger, but when I glanced at the universe through the eyes of a space telescope, I saw that science was offering me something larger than any new-age guru could dream of. And what’s more is that it was real; tangible; provable. Unlike the “truth” offered by faith, science demands nothing in return.
And that’s how Hubble saved my soul.
Headlines:
Joining me tonight for headlines is my fidus Achates, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to, um… I don’t know, feed us?
In our lead story tonight, the state of North Carolina decided to declare a state religion last week, then the ether wore off and they wondered who that lump in the bed was and where that tattoo came from and what the fuck they were thinking.
This story starts in Rowan County, North Carolina (go Mustangs!) where a lawsuit threatened to stop county commissioners from opening their meetings with a prayer. They had two choices, one was concede, give up the prayer and not look like stupid assholes. The other was to try to rewrite the constitution.
- They were trying to invoke a silly little idea that I remember my 10th grade history teacher asserting. The idea is that the constitution only forbids congress from establishing a religion, not the individual states.
- I’m not sure if there’s any real constitutional ground for that argument but I’m skeptical and so is North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis, who killed the bill once the national media started to make a stink about this. Which suggests to me that somehow North Carolina legislators didn’t realize that people were gonna make a stink about this.
- And that’s why we need watchdog groups.
LEAD STORY: The North Carolina State Religion: http://news.yahoo.com/could-north-carolina-actually-declare-state-religion-130700725.html Follow Up : http://www.goddiscussion.com/108691/north-carolina-house-speaker-kills-bill-that-would-have-allowed-the-state-to-create-a-state-sponsored-religion-in-violation-of-first-amendment-to-the-constitution/
And in “I’ll see your state religion and raise you twelve pounds of raw bat-shit” news, Louisiana State Representative Katrina R. Jackson has proposed a new bill that would force students to recite the Lord’s Prayer along with the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.
With an inspiring effort to yet be the most destructive Katrina in Louisiana’s history, Representative Jackson attempts to justify the bill with some of the most Orwellian language since Orwell. She actually says:
- “Students shall be informed that these exercises are not meant to influence an individual’s personal religious beliefs in any manner.”
- The recitations shall be conducted so that students learn of America’s great freedoms, including the freedom of religion symbolized by the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Louisiana state rep proposes a prayer-in-school law: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/05/louisiana-state-representative-students-should-learn-freedom-of-religion-by-reciting-the-lords-prayer-every-morning/
And following up on a story we covered back in episode 4, the big Jesus picture in Jackson, Ohio is coming down. You’ll recall a flurry of defensive posturing by the school board, who insisted that nothing on heaven or earth was going to make them take down their beloved Jesus pitcher.
Well, it turned out that all it took was an insurance company deciding that Jesus was a liability. And this goes to show you how heartless we atheists are. They tried to compromise. They offered to take the picture down from the Middle School and put it up in the High School but that wasn’t good enough for those secular humanist jackoffs.
But I do think it’s worth pointing out what a signpost this really is. It doesn’t take too many successful lawsuits by atheists to convince insurance companies to pull the plug on shit like this before it ends up wasting a truckload of taxpayer money.
Follow Up: School in Jackson Ohio agrees to remove Jesus painting: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/03/the-giant-portrait-of-jesus-is-finally-coming-down/
And in more shameful news, a new poll finds that 13% of Americans think that Obama is the anti-Christ. Many of our listeners will have already heard about this survey, as we’re not the only media outlet that found that number interesting. In addition to that statistic, the study also found that:
- 20% of Americans believe that childhood vaccines are linked to autism,
- 9% believe that fluoride is added to the water to control our minds,
- And 4% believe that shape-shifting lizards secretly control our government.
I find some of those numbers hard to believe and I hope that there was a lot of the “these questions have gotten so stupid I’m gonna start fucking with the interviewer” effect in it, but the fact that David Icke’s lizard theory is even well known enough to be included on the survey is plenty of evidence of some horrible failures in public education.
– I’d still be ashamed if only 13% of people believed that there would be an anti-christ.
Studies show that 13% of Americans think Obama is the anti-Christ: http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf
And sometimes you’re combing through news sources and you see a headline so promising you know it’s gonna make the show even before you read the article. A headline on the Christian Newswire caught my attention the other day. It said, and I quote, “Stephen Hawking Solves Bible Creation Mystery Proving the Bible Accurate”.
And basically what we’ve got here is every bit as stupid as what you expect when you read it. This apologist Paul Hutchins is trying to employ one of the Muslim apologist’s favorite tactics, the one where you say, “look at all the science that my book of bullshit predicts.”
This is kind of a dubious tactic in my mind, since all but eight words of the bible are contradicted by science, but nevertheless, he’s trying to say that the creation account in Genesis is in keeping with our current beliefs about how the planet formed.
Now, I’ll give him the credit of saying that he does get there, but he asks for a few huge favors when it comes to interpretation, including but not limited to:
– When the bible talks about 6 days they just mean “6 unequal periods of indeterminate time”
– When the bible says “Let there be light” what they clearly meant was “Let the sun transition from a protostar to a main sequence star.”
– When it talks about god making the sun 4 days after making day and night, they meant that he made the sun visible through the cloud of pre-solar system planetary fragments.
- He keeps talking about how these things “correspond exactly” to the Genesis account.
Stephen Hawking Solves Bible Creation Mystery Proving the Bible Accurate (I shit you not, that’s what the headline says): http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/2911771800.html
And finally tonight, The Foundation Beyond Belief has announced is 2nd quarter beneficiaries. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Foundation Beyond Belief, it is a most excellent secular charity that gathers donations in the name of atheism and then distributes them to a number of deserving charities.
Basically, they do all the hard work of confirming that none of your charitable dollars are going to support one of these half-charity/half-proselytizing funds. Which is helpful if you’ve ever wondered exactly how much of the money you gave to the Salvation Army was spent opposing gay rights.
The five charities selected for this quarter are:
- The One Acre Fund
- The Innocence Project of Texas
- T’ruah
- Bernie’s Book Bank
- And Trees, Water & People
To learn more about these charities and all the news items discussed on this episode, be sure to check out the shownotes at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
Foundation Beyond Belief Announces its 2nd quarter beneficiaries. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/03/foundation-beyond-belief-announces-q2-2013-slate-of-charities/
That does it for headlines tonight. Heath, appreciate your help as always.
And Heath, please stick around. When we come back, Lucinda Lugeons will join Heath and me for a little Bible study.
Skit:
Writer: Hey chief – Did you get a chance to look at the draft I sent you of “The Bible”?
Editor: Oh yeah the fictional allegory book . . . I looked it over . . . Why don’t you have a seat.
W: Sure, how did you like it?
E: (Sigh) I didn’t love it. I’m just a little worried people might take some of it literally.
W: Come on, seriously? The stories are absurd. How could someone take them literally?
E: Well… whenever the scripture department releases something, readers tend to get a little too carried away. Remember the shit show after we printed the Torah? Which actually brings me to my next concern . . . and if I’m way off base here, I’m sorry . . . But it seems like you pretty much plagiarized the entire Hebrew Bible for this first half. Is that what you did?
W: Listen, the Jews are not a very litigious people, so it’s not look they’re gonna sue us. But maybe I’ll add a few footnotes to properly cite the direct quotes.
E: Don’t get me wrong, that thing’s way overdue for a sequel, but do we really have to reprint the whole first book with it? That’s gonna cost a pretty shekel.
W: I’ll be honest, I had a little bit of writer’s block, and I couldn’t seem to get the ball rolling. I added some stuff though. Judith, Wisdom… um… Maccabees…
E: Yeah, we might have to trim that part.
W: Are you sure?
E: Not really no. Look, I understand borrowing from it, that’s not a huge problem. It’s not like a religious text is just going to pop into your head, divinely inspired, ready to print.
W: Right, I’m not just gonna find a bunch of golden plates with the words of god etched into them. So I did some research, and the Torah had a lot of stuff very similar to what I was looking to write myself. One god, omnipotent vengeance scenarios, get really mad at any future religion that also likes the Middle East. It just made sense as a jumping off point.
E: Okay let’s circle back to that. Open up your copy to the Leviticus section.
W: I’ve gotta stop you right there. I know what you’re gonna say. That was a really weird time for me. I had to stone my 4th concubine AND 3 slaves to death that month. Lots of mixed emotions. And my normal guy was out of town, so I had to call this delivery service I never used before, and I’m pretty sure they laced the frankincense with something crazy.
E: Listen, it’s understandable. I’m thinking maybe just a little disclaimer at the beginning. Novelty purposes only, or something.
W: I really think you’re underestimating the intelligence of our readership. It’s not like a giant population the world over is going to get swept up in some sort of crusade to make sure everyone agrees – word for word – with my little book here.
E: I guess you’re right. I’m probably being paranoid. I just had one other concern . . . Why all the hate against gays?
W: What?
E: All the anti-homosexual passages.
W: Where are there any anti-homosexual passages?
E: Right here in Leviticus. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination.” Then later in Romans and again in Jude. It seems like you’re at least tacitly allowing the lesbian stuff, but still…
W: I thought it was clear that this section was tongue in cheek. I guess I really didn’t sell the sarcasm. And I wasn’t even talking about the sex part, just the lying in bed after. Nobody wants to see 2 men cuddling. That’s just faggoty.
E: And what’s with all the Yoda talk, and the weird numbering. You really think people are going to refer back to this one book, line by line, and need reference numbers? Normal page numbers, like every other book, should be just fine.
W: That was a software issue. I wrote the thing in Aramaic, and when the word processor translated the characters over to Times Old Roman Latin, a bunch of random numbers showed up by accident.
E: Okay, let’s skip ahead to this “New Testament” part. I get what you’re going for here and I like the idea of god having a kid in the sequel, but that whole part seemed way off to me. The first four chapters just seem to be telling the same story over and over and none of them agree on the details. It’s just weird.
W: Yeah, I started off with a “choose your own adventure” concept in mind but eventually I just slapped everything together in that opening chunk.
E: (Big Sigh) Look, I’m gonna be perfectly honest with you. Religious texts are hot right now and the epic poetry division hasn’t had a best seller in centuries. There’s a lot of problems here, but we’re probably gonna roll with it anyway.
W: Good to hear.
E: Do you have anything in mind for the sequel?
W: I’m thinking illiterate, child raping warlord on a flying horse.
E: Not bad.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show where we set aside a few minutes to talk up some of the great atheist and secular meet-ups going on around the country and around the world.
We’ll start off with a Skepticamp event in Essex County, Massachusetts on April 13th. Runs from 9:30 to 4, has some really interesting topics lined up and ends out with a Skeptical Trivia event that should be a lot of fun.
http://skepticamp.capeannskeptics.com/?page_id=45
On April 20th we have the South Dakota Conference of Reason in Sioux Falls. And I know that people who live in and around South Dakota have a lot of choices when it comes to atheist conferences, but this one should be worth the drive.
Facebook Page for conference: https://www.facebook.com/events/214700748667522/?fref=ts
On the 27th of April there’ll be another Skepticamp event in Denver with an equally impressive slate of topics including a pretty promising talk on pseudo-astronomy, woo in women’s health and teen atheist outreach.
http://skepticamp.org/wiki/Skepticamp_Denver_2013
And finally in Atlanta we’ve got a three day skepticamp conference starting on the 3rd of May and running through the weekend.
http://www.atlantaskeptics.com/skepticamp/
And how could I not mention the fact that the Brisbane Atheists are hosting a Pirate Party for their monthly meet up on April 30th. I’d love to go just to find out what pirate-speak sounds like with an Australian accent. And incidentally, if any of my Australian listeners want to settle that mystery for me, feel free to send an audio clip.
http://www.somewheretothink.com.au/events/pirate-party-australia-brisbane-monthly-meetup-2013-04-30/
That’ll do it for the calendar this week, but I want to remind everybody listening that if you’re involved with an atheist, skeptical or secular event that could use some publicity, let me know. Also if you’re aware of any good online resources for such events, let me know about those as well. You’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at ScathingAtheist (dot) com. And remember, we’re weekly now so I need all the help I can get filling this segment.
Outro:
I had a couple of quick announcements before we close out the show. We’ve been putting a few segments of the show on You-Tube so if you want to share one part of the show with somebody who might not be able to make it through the whole show, check out our You-Tube channel for some bite-sized pieces of The Scathing Atheist.
We’ve also added a donation button to the website so if you were anxious to give us money, you could do that. Those donations are tax-deductible, but unfortunately that’s only for residents of Tatooine, Mordor and the magical land of Hyrule. The rest of you still have to pay your taxes.
We’ll have the long version of the Holy Babble segment up on the extras page on the website soon so be sure to check that out. Wanted to thank everyone who’s made their way over to iTunes to leave us a five star review. Gotta thank Lucinda and Heath for helping out tonight.
And I want to give a big thanks to George Hrab for both providing the Farnsworth quote to start us out and for entertaining the shit out of my wife and I last Friday night. The guys an incredible musician so if you’re a fan of the music, find an opportunity to watch him live. It’s an incredible experience and I’ll have links to all his upcoming events on the shownotes for the page. He also has a really fun podcast that I’ll link to as well.
http://www.geologicpodcast.com/
That does it for tonight, but if you want more be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow us on Twitter @Noah (underscore) Lugeons, like us on Facebook, subscribe to us on You-Tube, listen to us on Stitcher and give us money.
If you want to learn more about the news items and events discussed on this program, check out the shownotes for this episode. If you have any comments, questions or death threats you’ll find all the contact info on the “Contact” page at Scathing Atheist (dot) Com. All the music used in this program was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
Scathing Atheist on You-Tube
by Noah Lugeons
By popular request, we’re putting select segments from the show on You-Tube. We’ll be adding full episodes at a future date and Lucinda and I have been kicking around all kinds of weird ideas about adding puppets, animation, stop-motion and a bunch of other stuff that will probably prove more trouble than it’s worth.
Anyway, first things first. We’ve uploaded a couple of the diatribes already. You can check out our channel here and be sure to subscribe. We’ll be adding all kinds of cool shit eventually and you’ll definitely want to be in on the ground floor of that.
And if you don’t have time to subscribe just yet, that’s fine. You can get a sample here, too:
Episode 7: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons
Sponsor:
This week’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by all the awesome people who sent encouraging emails and tweets, left complimentary comments on the blog, gave us positive reviews on iTunes and otherwise helped convince us to start doing this thing on a weekly basis.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 4th, and I’m already tired of changing my fantasy baseball lineup.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from decadent New York, New York, This is the Scathing Atheist
On this week’s episode,
- A Riyadh woman has consensual sex despite overt bicycle riding,
- God blames his mysterious ways on the lack of a father figure in his life,
- And Tom Beasley of an American Atheist join us to explain how he gets off naming his atheist podcast after a country that was clearly founded as a Christian nation.
But first, Heath Enwright with the diatribe…
Diatribe:
Many religions believe that the universe is created by an intelligent designer. Existence is an experimental game and god is the initial inventor of the game and is now an all-knowing spectator watching as we humans misuse the power of choice he gave us. This notion is fucking absurd, but let’s explore it anyway.
If god’s a sports fan, his model sport for humankind is definitely NASCAR. The world he built is a very similar, ridiculously dangerous situation . . . A bunch of crazy rednecks, competitively wasting fossil fuels and god’s just watching from the stands waiting to see the really good wrecks.
The takeaway here, is that if god is a NASCAR fan, he’s can’t be that intelligent.
So if he even exists, intelligent design is not the preferred nomenclature. I’d call it Military intelligent design at best. Even GOD didn’t think through his exit strategy. Intelligently designed games end elegantly, like checkmate in chess. For this game of existence on earth, his exit strategy seems to be nuclear holocaust.
I’m just saying, if religion were to dial back their stance on the intelligence, and just go for the design claim I’d still think they were silly but noticeably less so. But they don’t do dialing back very well. Admitting fault isn’t exactly in the church’s wheelhouse. Granted the faults they’d need to admit are often unspeakable, but I’m pretty sure that actually makes it worse.
The point . . . is that god’s clearly not that smart, and it looks like devoutly religious people agree. Everyone I’ve ever met who takes a religion really seriously, is always trying to justify absurd ways to bend the rules. Like god didn’t read his own fine print.
Great example . . . take butt sex. If you’re willing to bend over the rules a little, anal sex is the #1 virginity preservation method. I like to call this the poop-hole loophole . . . Like this somehow softens the blow later when you’re married, and trying to make your sexual history sound less bad; “No I’m a legit virgin. I’ve had huge amounts of cock in the hole right next to it, but that vagina is clean virgin territory.”
Bullshit . . . Even then, you know they’ve played, ‘just the tip’, a few times.
Speaking of just the tip, my circumcised friend from college, named Israel, also a firm believer in the validity of the poop hole loophole, was excellent at finding ways to just barely avoid directly breaking all these detailed Orthodox Jew-y rules he had to deal with.
For example, he’s not allowed to use any fire, electricity, or machinery of any kind on Shabas, which is sundown Friday until sundown Saturday. So if we were all hanging out smoking pot on Friday night, he couldn’t partake. Unless of course somebody drew a bong hit into the tube without inhaling it, and then happened by chance to leave that random, glass, smoke-filled column sitting on the table with a coaster over it, and then Israel happened to randomly choose to take one of his normal breaths of air while that coaster was quickly removed and that glass tube was on his face.
This would just be a chain of unrelated events. The fire used to burn the pot to make the smoke to fill the tube was wielded by someone else and the bong water acted as a mystical justification barrier, completely separating the fire from whoever might have, by chance, been breathing too close to the bong afterward.
Like Jew God is up there going, “Shit, yeah that bong water really ties my hands on this one. My boss – “God God” – will be up my ass about this if I smite this crafty stoner.” And as far as I know, Israel’s never been smote, so clearly the loophole worked. And this encourages further abuse of the rules.
So why are we so surprised about priests raping kids? Bunch of priests sitting around – trying to figure out loopholes:
“God says we can’t have sex, and can’t masturbate. What option does that leave us? Roll with me on this, keeping in mind, the lord works in mysterious ways. What if a kid gave me a Dutch Rudder?
“We’re not touching dicks. I’m touching my dick, and he’s just working my arm. So I’m not jerking it, and he’s not jerking it, and everybody wins.”
I guess not that many priests are big Kevin Smith fans. All I’m saying . . . it seems like nobody is telling the priests’ side of the story. Maybe the rape thing was a little extreme, but clearly the current rules aren’t sustainable. If I were a priest, I’d be lobbying for glory holes in the confessional booth. At least slutty sinners could try to buy indulgences with happy endings .
There is another solution. It’s nowhere near as fun as my glory hole idea, but probably more reasonable. The church could always just acknowledge that celibacy is ridiculous and goes against the biological instinct to reproduce, or at least the instinct to get laid. But this solution would never happen, because the church would end up having to reconcile its absurd universe view with contradictory things like evidence.
Church’s just don’t do epistemology. Figuring things out with reason is a giant hassle compared to faith.
Headlines:
Joining me tonight for headlines is the Tango to my Cash, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to tango?
Alright, in our lead story tonight, Pennsylvania State Representative Tim Krieger has introduced legislation designed to act as an impediment to the first amendment. There’s a lot going on here, but the important thing to take away from it is that Representative Krieger is willing to boldly stand up to a beleaguered minority, as long as they’re kids.
Our story begins with Moses wandering down a mountain with a couple of tablets and placing them, in a roundabout way, in front of a school near Pittsburgh. A few secular students pointed out that a giant copy of the Ten Commandments shouldn’t be there. Officials refused to voluntarily remove it so the students got together with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and sued the school.
Well the judge in the case is trying to let them sue anonymously, but that’s reasonable so the Christians are against it.
Enter Tim Krieger, fanatical Christian blowhard and guy who looks like he would be second-in-command for a plot to take over the world, but not the main bad guy. He calls bullshit on that and proposes a law that would make it illegal for a plaintiff to sue anonymously regardless of the ruling of the judge in the case. But don’t worry; this would only apply to cases where religious monuments were being challenged on a Constitutional basis, so at least they’re not trying to pretend it’s fair.
Pennsylvania representative proposes law that would force atheist students to sue publicly: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/03/29/pennsylvania-rep-tim-krieger-doesnt-care-if-atheists-get-harassed-by-christians/
And in other centuries, the morality of Catholicism is in the news again, despite not having changed in generations. The latest incarnation of their pre-scientific ethics comes to us from Boston, home of the nation’s oldest public park, numerous substandard sports franchises and Boston College where officials have threatened disciplinary action against students for the unspeakable crime of promoting safe sex.
Yes, it’s the fucking condom thing again.
The group BC Students for Sexual Health was hit with a “cease and desist” order saying that the group’s goal of promoting common sense was (quote) “not in concert with the mission of Boston College as a Catholic and Jesuit University”
Boston College stops students from handing out condoms: http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/27/us/boston-college-condoms-dispute/index.html
In other news, our whirlwind tour of bat-shit crazy states makes a long-overdue stop in Utah where the Mormons look to cement their reputation as backwards even compared to other religions. The Christian Newswire alerts us to a new service offered by a Salt Lake City based Mormon pseudo-clinic that brings cyber-homophobia into the 21st century.
This is another one of those “pray the gay out” type of things where some callous charlatan takes money from a conflicted person whose preacher tells them they’re identity is offensive to god. In the press release they refer to homosexuality as “same-sex attraction”, which I thought was a nice touch.
Anti-gay web resource for Mormon homophobes: http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/8297071798.html
And from the “Somebody-Had-To-Say-It” department, a new study warns parents that extreme religiosity in a child could be a warning sign of insanity. Every article I saw on the study was really careful to point out all the beneficial corollaries of faith in kids, such as lower incidence of criminal behavior, higher self-esteem, better academic performance and less trouble fucking the preppy chicks, but the association between religion and crazy is pretty hard to ignore.
The study warns that extreme devotion to a religion could be emblematic of anxiety, unaddressed trauma or stress, obsessive compulsive disorder, bi-polar disorder, scrupulosity, schizophrenia, manic depressive or early onset of being-an-insufferable-dick.
Now, we make a lot of jokes about this, but this is pretty serious because one of the really pervasive side effects of religion is that it gives crazy people something to cloak themselves in. Everybody has to be at least a little “crazy” to profess some of the beliefs that organized religion demands, so it’s easy to imagine somebody delaying psychological treatment for a child because they don’t want to say, “he’s so religious it’s crazy”. Faith has been mislabeled a virtue so if something that would be clearly nuts in any other context pops up in the context of religion, people are way less likely to go, “that motherfucker’s crazy.”
Study warns that children who are “too religious” may be crazy: http://news.yahoo.com/child-too-religious-094552602.html
Moving on to some “Other-Countries-Are-Laughing-At-Us” news, an atheist shoe company in Berlin is charging that the US Post Office deliberately discriminates against them and backs up the allegation with an informal study that showed that identical packages with their abominable “Atheist” logo took an average of 3 days longer to arrive at their destination.
To be fair, this wasn’t exactly a scientific study and it wasn’t exactly published in a peer review journal, but the results look pretty damning for the USPS, especially since the whole experiment was prompted when US customers starting asking the company to leave off the telltale tape that said “Atheist-Atheist-Atheist” across it.
The take away, though, is that there’s a company that makes pretty cool looking shoes that say “Ich Bin Atheist” on them and they’re getting some free advertising on our show courtesy of the Post Office being a bunch of miserable dicks.
Atheist shoe company accuses US Post Office of discrimination: http://www.atheistberlin.com/study
And in this week’s living, breathing evidence against intelligent design, Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo has announced that he will impotently wave $10,000 around in the air in a vainglorious, insincere, meaningless publicity stunt.
Mastropaolo, a grown adult with an advanced degree who believes in Noah’s Ark is pretending to offer $10,000 to anyone who can “scientifically disprove” the literal creation account described in Genesis. And yes, that’s the one where they say god created night and day a full three days before creating the sun.
People with competent navigation of their own brains point out that “scientifically disproving” something is a meaningless term and thus an impossible standard to meet. They also point out that if Mastropaolo was so confident, he wouldn’t be insisting that anyone trying to claim the prize also put up $10,000. And of course, they also point out that the generally accepted foundations of biology, astronomy, geology, chemistry, cosmology, anthropology, literature and philosophy all “disprove” a literal interpretation of the bible to any reasonable standard.
Creationist offers $10,000 to anyone who can scientifically “disprove” creationism: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/joseph-mastropaolo-creationist-10000-disprove-genesis_n_2964801.html
And finally, in international news, Saudi Arabia makes a bold move to counteract the baseless stereotype that women are mistreated in majority Muslim countries. In a valiant and unprecedented move that would have made Elizabeth Cady Stanton look like Archie Bunker’s wife, the religious police in Saudi Arabia have lifted the ban on women riding bicycles.
Now, obviously you can’t do this all at once or you’d risk utter chaos, so they’ll be limiting this to specific parks and recreational areas, and, of course, the women will have to be chaperoned by a male relative and covered from head to toe in a potato sack, but I think it’s safe to say that sexism in Saudi Arabia is pretty much over.
Saudi authorities lift ban on women in bikes: http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-religious-police-lift-ban-women-bikes-111923001.html
That’s all we’ve got for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks for hanging out.
When we come back, Tom Beasley will join me to circle religion like a hungry buzzard.
Skit:
Occasionally we get feedback from listeners that really enjoy the show, but think that we sometimes get a little carried away. For example, in last week’s episode, when discussing the Westboro Baptist Church, my co-host Heath Enwright expressed a desire to savagely penetrate Fred Phelps’ rectum.
We received several comments about the segment but I chose two that represented what I’ve come to think of as the two distinct audiences that this program appeals to.
Jon on Facebook said he really enjoyed parts of the show, but felt that the anally penetrating Fred Phelps portion went (quote) “beyond edgy and made me squeamish”. On the other hand, we also got an email from Daniel in Plano who said, “Love it! I almost pissed myself when Heath started talking about butt-fucking Phelps!”
So in our ceaseless quest to push the envelope of podcasting, I’d like to offer two explanations of the Fred Phelps comments. And because the show is only 30 minutes, I’d like to offer both explanations at the same time.
So if you find yourself in the “Jon” camp that feared that segment might make them vomit, please remove your right earphone for the remainder of this segment. If you’re more in “Daniel’s” spontaneous urination camp, please remove your left earphone. And if you’re not generally inspired to exude any bodily secretions over our skits, feel free to leave both earphones in and get twice as much podcast for the next few minutes.
*
We live in a world where the walls of censorship are fast falling away. Where once some government (censor/ cock-stain) stood between your ears and the vulgarities of less (cultured/ prudish) (individuals/ motherfuckers), in the 21st century, you’re no longer protected from words like (George Carlin’s notorious seven/ shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits).
There is, of course, one (negative/ positive) consequences (While/…) it expands the scope of the first amendment to previously unimagined heights, we also (have/ get) to (endure/ enjoy) a lot more (off-color/ dick and fart) jokes and (lewd/ hilarious) social commentary. As a result, some (refined/ uptight) consumers of new media with little (tolerance/ appreciation) for vulgarity get (offended/ fucked).
As a producer of such content, one must act as one’s own censor and must thus strike a (delicate/ frustrating) balance between being too (vulgar/ boring) and being too (academic/ vulgar). While I respect and appreciate the concerns of the people who wish I would be (vulgar/ myself) less often, I’m naturally inclined to side with the group that most mirrors my own sense of (propriety/ humor). The unfortunate result is that I must occasionally ask some members of my audience to (endure in good humor/ go fuck themselves).
Take, for example, our recent headline segment about the (detestable bigots/ spunk-garglers) at the Westboro Baptist Church. During that segment, our mutual dislike for the group was obvious and my co-host made some (untoward/ hysterical) comments about their leader, Fred Phelps, and things that might be hatefully inserted into his (anus/ asshole), including Heath’s (hateful /throbbing) (member/ dick).
While some (people/ prudes) found this offensive, I think it’s important to keep in mind that Fred Phelps is (despicable/ an ass nugget) and deserves to be (mocked/ gay hate fucked) mercilessly. What’s more, we should do so with (unapologetic/ un-lubricated), (spite-filled/ splinter-filled) (voracity/ broom handles) in the deepest, most (scornful/ painful) way.
And when we, here at the Scathing Atheist, (comment publicly/ blow our juice) on Fred Phelps, we hope that we can hit him (where it hurts/ in the eyes) and really make it sting. A gifted few can do so by way of intellectual criticisms, but those of us without the (education/ desire) or the (verbal dexterity/ words and shit) to express such scathing distaste without resorting to (obscenity/ fuck) filled tirades (have/ get) to resort to the (basest/ funniest) type of humor.
The important thing to remember is that regardless of what words we choose, we all agree that if any target is deserving of our foulest utterings, it is the kind of (visceral/ass-brained) (animosity/ fucktardary) and (lunacy/ bullshit) promoted by the Westboro Baptist Church.
Okay, this (segment/ shit) is really hard to edit, so please put your (right/ left) earphone back in now.
Calendar:
It’s time for the Atheist Calendar portion of the show. This week we’ll be highlighting some of the great secular meet-ups and conventions coming up in April.
We’ll start in Lawrence, Kansas where “Reasonfest 3” will be taking place over the weekend of April 20th. The lineup is fantastic, led by Seth Andrews, JT Eberhard, Jerry DeWitt plus Matt Dillahunty in a debate called “Moral Combat” and something with the enticing title “The Godless Pervert Story Hour” featuring notable godless perverts Greta Christina, David Fitzgerald and more.
http://kusoma.org/2013/01/reasonfest-2013/
A lot of action the following week in the nation’s capital: The Secular Coalition for America will be hosting a Secular Summit from April 24th to the 26th that’ll include some great instruction on effective secular lobbying.
http://secular.org/lobbyday2013
Also in DC on the 27th of April the Center For Inquiry will be hosting “Why Tolerate Religion”, a day long symposium tackling the contentious issue of religion’s role in our supposedly secular government.
http://action.centerforinquiry.net/site/Calendar?id=103301&view=Detail
And for our West Coast heathens, CFI on Campus will be hosting a Leadership Conference in the City of Angels on the same weekend.
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/oncampus/slcla2013
Of course, wherever you are in the world, don’t forget that according to the Secular Students Alliance, Thursday, April 18th is National Ask an Atheist Day, so check your local listings to see if there’s any way you can get involved.
http://www.secularstudents.org/askanatheistday
If you want to learn more about this or any of the other events discussed on this episode, check the shownotes for episode 7 at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
That’ll do it for this week’s calendar. As always, if you’re involved in an atheist, skeptical or secular event that needs a little free publicity, let me know. And if you’re not involved in an atheist, skeptical or secular event, what the hell are you waiting for?
Interview Links:
An American Atheist Blog: http://anamericanatheist.org/
Outro:
So that’s about all the time we’ve got for tonight. I want to thank Tom Beasley for hanging out with us, I want to thank Alan Blumlein for inventing stereo sound and also want to give a big thanks for Cecil & Tom from Cognitive Dissonance for providing this week’s circuitous Farnsworth quote. Those guys put on a really fun podcast, so you should definitely check them out at Dissonance Pod (dot) com.
I also want to thank the lovely Lucinda Lugeons for everything she does behind the scenes, Heath Enwright for everything he does in front of the scenes. But mostly I want to thank god for making this podcast possible by not existing.
Be sure to check back with us in 168 hours for the “Holy Babble” edition, in which Heath, my wife and I will do something that at least two of us will regret almost immediately. If you can’t wait that long, be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow me on Twitter @Noah (underscore) Lugeons and like us on Facebook because apparently people still use Facebook.
If you enjoy the show, please help us spread the word by leaving us a glowing review on iTunes or whatever you use. Don’t forget to help drive up our Stitcher ranking by listening to us there and if you don’t have the Stitcher app yet, don’t worry, I’m not judging you for it the way all the attractive members of the opposite sex are.
If you have comments, questions or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the Contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
Religion as Child Abuse
by Noah Lugeons
Yeah, a lot has been said about this already so I’m not going to devote too much time to it here. The four horsemen have long since established what I feel to be a compelling and nigh undeniable argument that religion is often a guise for child abuse. And we’re not talking about the sexual abuse that has become so synonymous with religious leaders, we’re talking about the actual practice of teaching religion to children.
The apologists like to sweep this under the rug. When they address a crowd of hostile atheists, they downplay the literalism of the bible. They pretend that religious people all look at it like a divinely inspired-Aesop’s Fables. They like to pretend that Christians don’t treat the bible as being 100% accurate. But when we’re not looking, that’s exactly what they’re teaching their kids.
I recall a field trip I took in 3rd grade where my class was presented with a human skeleton and asked if we could determine whether it was the skeleton of a man or a woman. Without exception, every kid in my class immediately took to counting the ribs. Until then, there was no difference between the authority of a religious figure and a secular teacher. They were both grown-ups who told us things with authority. They were both people who our parents told us we should listen to and respect. How were we to know that one source was sound and the other bullshit?
But when all the little Christian Twitter trolls pop up to give us atheists the smack-down we so richly deserve, they have to answer for shit like this. When a kid gets really, really interested in science she or he might learn something that will aid them for the rest of their lives. But when a kid gets really, really interested in religion, she or he might do this:
Belittling Christians
by Noah Lugeons
Sometimes people say, “Noah, you belittle Christians a lot.”
And I respond, “Yeah, I do my best.”
So no, I’ll be offering no apology for it here or anywhere else in the foreseeable future. When people point out that I belittle Christians, I respond the same way that an Olympic sprinter would respond if somebody asked her why she was in such a hurry… After all, that’s kind of the point.
Now, there are those that would say that this is counterproductive. They say that the caustic brand of atheism I subscribe to is antithetical to the goals of minimizing the role of religion in society. They present a “circle-the-wagons” mentality that I might inspire if I’m too insulting. They point out that the more attainable goals of keeping religion out of science class and the courtroom can be hamstrung by the more grandiose goal of stamping out organized religion altogether.
And what’s more, they might be right. I still don’t care.
My goal as an atheist activist is to marginalize religion. I work toward a world where anybody who believes in something without evidence is embarrassed to admit it in public. I want reason by way of shame.
I think it’s a sad commentary on our culture that my unwavering belief that all truth-claims should be subjected to the same scrutiny puts me in the extreme wing of a minority. That shouldn’t be a bold stance. It should be nearly unthinkable to take any other stance and that’s precisely what I seek.
To be fair, I’ll concede that it’s entirely possible to take that stance without belittling anyone. A lot of skeptics do yeoman’s work by patiently walking sasquatch hunters, UFOlogists and homeopaths through the ladder of logic without a hint of condescension. I admire that ability but I do not share it.
And of course, many skeptics are crass and dismissive of nonsense like sasquatch hunters, UFOs and homeopathy. They don’t bother to spare anyone’s feelings and simply treat it like the demonstrable bullshit that it is. In the skeptical movement the battle between “soft” and “hard” is a hell of a lot more muted than the one in the atheist movement, but it’s still there. Some people just insist that the “kill-them-with-kindness” approach is the only valid one.
Many much wiser observers than me have pointed out that there probably isn’t one “valid” approach, so I’m not going to spend any time retreading that ground, but there is something I’d like to offer to the kindness camp. Sure, it’s an anecdote and can thus be easily dismissed, but I think it’s illustrative of the justification behind the approach that I share with a number of other scathing atheists.
Arrogance is a powerful force. Those of us who like to think or ourselves as intelligent don’t like to be told we’re stupid. It’s the only insult that really gets under the skin of some people. Now, when somebody says, “you disagree with me so you’re stupid” it’s meaningless, but if someone you respect intellectually lumps your beliefs in with a bunch of the other “stupid” ones, that has an impact.
I’m not saying there’s anyone out there that respects me intellectually, but there are a number of learned men and women in both the atheist and skeptical movements who sport intellects that are beyond reproach. An intellectually arrogant person hearing that his beliefs are stupid from those people will have an effect.
Now sure, some people are arrogant enough to just toss off the insult and say, “what does that ivy-league professor know?”, but those people are all-but unreachable. But for many if not most intellectually arrogant people, the root of the arrogance was real intelligence. And there are plenty of intelligent, arrogant people out there that still believe in some really silly stuff.
Those people are vulnerable to the caustic attack. I know because that’s how I arrived here. I got to atheism through simple observation and the correct application of logic, but I became a skeptic and (more importantly) a skeptical activist because somebody with an intellect I admire told me I was a dumb-ass. And what’s more, he didn’t try to cater to my ego by telling me how okay it was to still believe this dumb-ass belief.
Now I know that the research shows that most people are far more inclined to listen to and consider your viewpoint if you’re non-confrontational and I recognize that, generally speaking, this is the optimum approach. Hell, it’s the one I usually employ when I’m talking to someone in person. But just because it’s the most widely applicable approach doesn’t mean it’s the only correct one. A person like myself would never be swayed by it, as they would take the agreeable demeanor as a sign of intellectual uncertainty. They would toss off anything you said that didn’t crack the armor of their intellectual arrogance and the only way to do that is to be caustic.
My mother told me that if I didn’t have anything nice to say, I shouldn’t say anything. And a lot of people have told me the same thing since. I get it. I disagree. I feel that it would be intellectually dishonest to say anything nice and it would be socially irresponsible to stay silent.
And if you disagree with my approach, that’s fine. I strongly encourage you to get involved and run as far in the opposite direction as possible. We need all the help we can get. And I believe that we also need all the types of help we can get.
The Scathing Atheist 